The efficient functioning of modern societies relies on innumerable discrete items of infrastructure. In many cases, particularly where such items are located in remote or difficult to reach or monitor locations, a malfunction or adverse incident may remain undetected for considerable lengths of time causing inconvenience, economic loss or even potentially hazardous situations.
Regular inspection of many such items of infrastructure in remote areas, for example irrigation sluices, gates, stock watering troughs etc is usually impractical. Similar impracticality or prohibitive expense is associated with the monitoring for example of such items as tool sheds at building sites, tool boxes on trucks, and equipment and plant remaining on construction sites etc.
The need for monitoring is of course not restricted to remote areas. Security and status of equipment, buildings and vehicles and the like is important everywhere. However, setting up a monitoring system is frequently a complicated procedure, often involving complex wiring of hardware installations, site visits by professional personnel.
It is an object of the present invention to address or at least ameliorate some of the above disadvantages.
Note
The term “comprising” (and grammatical variations thereof) is used in this specification in the inclusive sense of “having” or “including”, and not in the exclusive sense of “consisting only of”.
The terms “owner”, “user”, “registered user” are used interchangeably in this specification for any person authorised to predefine the steps to be executed in response to a signal from an individual signal unit (ISU).